Tag Archives: History

The latest special exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science is Vikings: Beyond the Legend. I was looking forward to seeing it. When I first began researching different cultures for my book, I had no idea where to begin. I visited the children’s non-fiction section of my local library and pulled off the shelf every cultural and historical book that looked remotely interesting. I remember reading a few books on Vikings but, as my attention was quickly diverted to the cultures of the Ancient Mediterranean, my reading on Vikings quickly fell by the wayside. I was looking forward to re-acquainting myself with them.

I began said re-acquaintance by attending a lecture at the museum before purchasing a ticket to the exhibit. The lecture assured me I would see the Vikings in a new light; show me proof they were much more than raiders and killers portrayed by history. Maps shown at the lecture did make me aware that Viking ships made it far further into various lands than I knew and that was interesting. However, as another slide showed archaeological evidence that victims of a raid had been neatly buried in one mound with all their heads neatly buried in one adjacent, the lecture didn’t do much to dispel the raider image. I had hopes the exhibit would do a better job.

It did. The artifacts on display are incredible. I learned Viking culture was so much more than swords and raids. Metallurgy did involve the forging of swords but it also resulted in fabulous jewelry the intricacy of which, the exhibit tells me, is almost impossible to replicate today.

I was able to see Viking ingenuity at work in the inner workings of a lock. The spring mechanism, activated by pressure from the teeth of a key, was brilliant. I wish I had been able to get a photo of it. The exhibit did tell me that the penalty for theft where the goods had been locked away was higher than if they had not. An interesting facet of law.

The role of women in Viking culture interested me. I had always thought that only men went a viking but, apparently, this isn’t so. Women too, went on these travels. Women had a great deal of authority in the home, more so than most other women of their day, and this role and power as household manager is symbolized with the keys found in some burials of women.

Of course, Viking raids did definitely happen and were brutal. And yet, the Vikings were also accomplished traders, dealing in goods as far away as China. There was a replica of a Buddha found in a burial but, try as I might, I couldn’t get a clear photo of it. I did manage to get a picture of a glass beaker, something I would have thought would be unheard of in Viking lands.

One last observation: I took a photo of this blurb from the exhibit.

That struck me. In my reading, I learned that some Viking colonies had been abandoned, presumably because of a lack of natural resources. This understanding and resiliency showed me how truly multi-faceted Viking culture really was.

I left the exhibit with a desire to know more and I decided to go straight to the source. What did the Vikings have to say about themselves? To find out, I purchased The Sagas of the Icelanders from the gift shop. I look forward to reading it and learning more about this fascinating culture.

A caveat:

I googled tips for taking photos in a museum and did try to put them to good use but I still have a long way to go. 🙂

I recently came across another of history’s little-told stories; that of the female Samurai. I haven’t done extensive study of the Samurai culture and history but what little I have done has acquainted me with names like Oda Nobunaga, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. A name I hadn’t come across before was Nakano Takeko. An hour long documentary entitled Samurai Warrior Queens on the Smithsonian channel introduced me to this fierce woman.

Nakano Takeko was born in Edo, a member of the Aizu domain and daughter of an Aizu official. Samurai women were trained in martial arts so they could protect the estates from bandits and Takeko began her training when she was six. She quickly showed aptitude, not only for the martial arts training but in scholarly pursuits as well. Her favorite stories were of Tomoe Gozen, a Samurai woman who’d fought and died 600 years before Takeko’s birth.

When Takeko was 16 her master, Daisuke, presented his nephew to her as a potential husband. If Takeko accepted, she’d be subject to her new husband and her name would probably have been lost to history. She refused and had to separate herself from her disgruntled master, becoming a martial arts instructor in her own right.

At the same time, Japan was rapidly changing. The Samurai had been in power for over 1000 years but their power was waning, as was Japan’s isolation from the west. It was an American, Commodore Matthew Perry, who used gunboat diplomacy to force the Shogun into a trade treaty in 1854. Once America had a foothold; Britain, France, and Russia followed. Many Samurai felt their country had been humiliated and rose against the Shogun, joining together under the banner of the Emperor, a relatively useless ruler based in Kyoto.

The Emperor’s Samurai had access to western weapons-rifles and canon-while the Shogun’s Samurai fought with the historical edged weapons. Not surprisingly, the Shogun’s Samurai were defeated and retreated north; Nakano Takeko and her sister Yuko among them.

The Shogun’s Samurai prepared for a last stand and a westerner, Henry Schnell, promised he could get them weapons. He intended to smuggle them through the port of Niigata but he was unsuccessful and ended up fleeing for his life. The Shogun’s Samurai were on their own.

Rumors spread about the Emperor’s fighters raping women and selling them into slavery but Takeko was determined not to commit suicide. She and her sister were determined to fight and other women rallied around them. They presented themselves at an Aizu outpost but the Samurai commander refused to allow them to fight as an official part of the domain’s army. Not to be refused, on the morning of October 10, 1868, Takeko Nakano leads 18 other women into battle.

They should have been cut down. The Emperor’s Samurai were armed with rifles, probably Spencer rifles; repeating rifles capable of 15 shots per minute. Instead, the order was given to take the women alive. This was a mistake. The opposing army was stunned at the women’s ferocity and none fought harder than Takeko. Despite her skill and ferocity, Nakano Takeko was killed. Her sister, Yuko, removed her head from the battlefield to prevent her from becoming an enemy trophy and managed to get it back to the family’s temple where the priest promised to bury Takeko with honor.

A memorial to Nakano Takeko has been erected and modern Japanese women train in the same fighting style Takeko would have learned. And yet, Nakano Takeko isn’t alone. While the traditional role of female Samurai was to defend castles, extinguish fires, tend wounded, and prepare ammunition, there were many who played vital roles on battlefields. And yet, most Samurai history revolves around men.

I have a book, Samurai: The code of the Warrior by Thomas Louis and Tommy Ito. This is hardly a comprehensive history of the Samurai and yet the only mention of female Samurai is:

Samurai girls did not receive formal education, but they were expected to run their husbands’ estate while they were away at war. They also received martial arts training, especially in the yari and naginata, and there are many examples of samurai women fighting alongside their husbands. The most famous samurai woman, Tomeo Gozen, lived during the Gempei Wars. She decapitated the enemy leader after he ripped her clothes, and she presented his head to her husband.

Why is there so little said of female Samurai’s contribution? According to the Smithsonian’s documentary, it would be shameful if the victorious outcome of a battle could, in any way, be attributed to women. Thus, glory and honor were reserved exclusively for male warriors. That is changing.

Archaeological evidence is finally showing the true magnitude of contributions of many women who fought with the same spirit as Nakano Takeko. Bones were discovered at Senbon Matsubara, site of a 1580 battle involving the Takeda Samurai. As the bones were unearthed and studied, forensic archaeologists were able to determine 30% of the fighting force were women. This discovery prompted the study of other battlefields and archaeologists were surprised to find the average held true: almost 30% of the Samurai fighting forces were women.

Nakano Takeko and her army were retroactively called the Women’s Army but their contribution recognized and history is beginning to recognize the many other women that sacrificed and died, equal to their male counterparts. The Samurai Warrior Queens.

Like this:

I’ve never paid too much attention to American History. I’ve always been fascinated with Rome, Carthage, Egypt, and Parthia and Medieval England is the latest period I’ve spent any time with. Still, I’m a history buff and I was able to persuade my family to stop at the Anasazi and Fremont Indian State Parks during our trip to Utah. More on the Anasazi people later.

The Fremont Indian State Park was a fascinating place and I highly recommend stopping there if you ever get a chance. My family and I were the only visitors so I had the museum to myself. I was delighted to spend as much time with the exhibits as I liked without having to try and read over someone else’s head or dodge children. It was in the museum that the similarities between Ancient American and Ancient Egyptian Cultures first clicked in my mind. I was grinding corn with the mano and metate when I looked up to read the description of the artifacts. Whoever had written it had added that the Ancient Americans suffered from painful teeth due to bits of stone ending up on the grain. I’d read the exact same thing in Red Land, Black Land by Barbara Mertz and was struck by the similarity. I shrugged it off: of course there would be similarities between cultures, I told myself: there are only so many materials from which basic tools can be crafted. It makes sense both cultures would grind grain between two stones.

And yet…as I traveled through the outdoor exhibits and saw the cave paintings, I was struck again with how similar the two cultures are: similar and yet utterly unique. I thought perhaps it was merely human nature to wish to leave something behind; something carved into stone that tells future generations ‘I was here. I lived.’ Apparently, both the Ancient Egyptians and Ancient Americans felt the same way. I marked the similarities and went home.

Pictures of the Cave Paintings-you have to look close to see some of them

I admit I didn’t pay them much more thought until I was purchasing more books. I’d listed a few from the Fremont State Park library I wanted to read and, while I was searching for those titles, I found They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America by Ivan Van Sertima; a professor of Afro-American studies at Rutgers University. I was reading Jack Turner’s Spice at the time and was curious what Professor Van Sertima had to say about pre-Columbian visitors. I knew about a Viking presence but had never heard of an African presence before.

The entire book is fascinating. I can’t say enough good things about it. Get it. Read it. I wish I had time to discuss the entire book but I’ll limit myself to Chapters 7 through 9 because they reminded me of the sense of similarity between Egyptian and American cultures I’d felt at the Fremont Indian State Park.

Chapter Seven, titled Black Africa and Egypt, introduced me to the influence of racially black Africans on Egypt and how many of things I considered uniquely Egyptian-mummification, tomb painting, bird and animal deities-had their origins among Africans south and west of the Nile. Chapter Eight, titled The Black Kings of the Twenty-Fifth Dynasty, introduced me to Nubian Kings who liberated Egypt from Assyrian vassalage and ruled it for a century. Chapter Nine, titled African-Egyptian Presences in Ancient America, took me through the archaeological evidence that not only proves Africans had crossed the Atlantic and mingled with Ancient Americans, but that there are astonishing similarities between Ancient American and Ancient Egyptian cultures.

The North Equatorial current and counter current make travel between the African and American continents possible. Professor Van Sertima includes descriptions of experiments proving such travel and culture sharing was possible with the level of ship sophistication of the time, especially that of the Egyptians and Phoenicians. Travel and culture sharing happened across the Sahara and that culture sharing was carried across the Atlantic long before it was believed to be possible.

I found this absolutely fascinating. Of course the two cultures are unique but, arm-chair scholar that I am-I saw the similarities and was amazed to learn there is archaeological proof for culture sharing hundreds of years before Columbus. The culture sharing went both ways: I read it’s a bit more difficult to make the crossing from American to Africa but Professor Van Sertima shows examples of linguistic similarities that suggest an American influence in Northern Africa.

I never learned this in school. Public school classes are, by necessity, overviews of history and I get that but I think this African influence, the culture sharing across the Sahara, and the fact that there were great explorers who carried their culture across a vast ocean, is worth knowing. I look forward to studying more African history. And, my interest in American history has been piqued. I think seeing how these African-Egyptian influences were absorbed into and made unique by Olmec, Aztec, and Mayan cultures will be fascinating. I’m going to need more bookshelves.

These all came from the Cave of 100 Hands

I wonder what the squiggle means…

The Little Frog Man is a bit blurry-I couldn’t get closer

The Cave had to be barred because of vandals so I pushed my camera’s zoom capability to the limit